


Kintsugi and Scales

by darkmagess



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: M/M, Touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 03:47:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19220932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkmagess/pseuds/darkmagess
Summary: Based on artwork by JolieMariellaAziraphaleCrowleyAziraphale accidentally lets Crowley sees his angel mark and Crowley enthusiastically lets Aziraphale see his.





	Kintsugi and Scales

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cryptid_jack](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptid_jack/gifts).



Aziraphale had no desire to witness the ashes of the book shop. And so, when Crowley suggested, “You can stay at my place, if you like,” he went, with only a twinge of reluctance—more habit than thought—and found himself deposited in a large, immaculate, and empty guest room with a good view of Westminster.

He stared out the window at the pattern of familiar lights, and then scanned the room. A single bedside table, empty save for a flowering orchid. The crisp white sheets of the bed, folded, tucked and pressed as though hotel staff had just been through—only a better thread count. One gray and boxy loveseat with simple lines and thick cushions. The walls seemed miles away, and as he paced from the window to the only chair, he wondered what Crowley did with it all.

Or rather, what would he do with it all now?

They’d won, after all. Impossibly. Most improbably. The world existed, when it shouldn’t, and might keep doing so for a while. Aziraphale hadn’t made any plans for that. And his last one, well, went up in smoke.

With a sigh, he sloughed off his jacket and laid it over the arm of the loveseat. Tried not to think about the first editions he’d bought in person, as he unbuttoned his waistcoat. Certainly fought the stir of despair over the books of prophecy, none of which had foreseen this end, as he plucked his tie loose and set it aside.

Aziraphale had himself a fine pile of clothes and thoughts he wasn’t having as he pulled off his undershirt with a glance toward those luxury sh—.

 _Gasp_.

He flinched at the sudden, sharp sound from the door and went rigid. The small muscles of his hidden wings pulled in tighter. The door. He’d left the door…

Stupid, stupid angel.

Aziraphale’s mouth went dry as he stood, shirt still clutched, half turned between the loveseat and the bed. And half-naked.

“What…”

Slow, steady footsteps drew closer.

“Is…”

He felt the air like pins on his exposed skin and the creeping heaviness of shame.

“That.”

The footsteps stopped. Aziraphale waited a moment just to see if a miracle would happen.

It didn’t.

And he couldn’t just _ignore_ him standing there. That would be as rude as walking into someone’s room uninvited.

Aziraphale loosened his fingers enough to let the shirt drop to the seat and turned very slowly, squaring his shoulders like someone who just saved the world. His mouth pressed into a line of distress.

Crowley gawped at him, staring slack-jawed.

“How have I never seen this?” the demon whispered.

He didn’t have to point.

Aziraphale didn’t have to look.

A vein of gold cracked across his stomach and chest—a fissure of inhuman flesh.

The heat of shame deepened.

“Because no one has. I don’t—“

Crowley moved closer, his gaze locked on the lines of divine kintsugi. He ducked to get a better angle and seemed to ignore the fact the Aziraphale spoke at all.

“—show people,” Aziraphale finished, frowning at the invasion. His hands itched to grab the shirt.

“Why not?” Crowley asked, his voice breathy.

Annoyance spiked through the shame, and Aziraphale glared at Crowley’s hair, which was all he could see.

“Because!”

“Because why?”

“Because it’s _ugly_.”

Crowley’s head snapped up. “Who told you that?” And there was anger in it.

Aziraphale stared at him in confusion. “No one.”

“WHO?” Crowley crowded in close and showed teeth. “I want a name.”

“No one!” No one had told him the sky was blue or that kindness was good, either. Some things are simply obvious. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Me? You! You’re—” Crowley sputtered and stepped back just to gesture. “ _Ugly?_ ” He sounded scandalized and looked distraught.

Aziraphale’s fists clenched at his sides. This was preposterous behavior. And he had the uncharitable thought that maybe demons _liked_ ugly things. “It looks—“ The words caught in his throat for a moment while he marshaled a suitable defense. But Crowley stood watching him, with a softening expression, and his defenses faltered. “It looks _broken_ ,” he managed to say. “Like _I’m_ broken.” He didn’t say imperfect, but Crowley heard it all the same and any vestige of outrage went out of him.

“Or,” the demon said gently, “like you were worth putting back together.”

Aziraphale had no answer to that. He frowned and felt the urge again to grab a shirt and hide the mark.  

But Crowley’s fascination was itself a wonder. He approached, shrouded in that quiet awe, and this time reached a hand ever so slowly toward one of the gold lines that crossed Aziraphale’s chest. All his attention gathered on that single spot, and his fingers flexed with hesitancy a mere inch away.

A line appeared between Aziraphale’s brows. “What?” he asked, quite unsure if he wanted an answer.

Crowley lifted one shoulder and tilted his head without looking up.

“You’ve touched me before,” Aziraphale said, feeling impertinent.

“Not this,” Crowley replied, with breathy awe. “It’s—“ He shrugged. “Like consecrated ground.”

What foolishness.

Aziraphale tsked at the melodrama. “Crowley. Really—“

“It _glows_ , angel.” Crowley glanced at him. “Can’t you see it?”

Aziraphale frowned and looked at himself.

He couldn’t.

It didn’t. Not even a little. And the betrayal stung.

Crowley pressed his lips together, swallowed, and touched a fingertip to the gold. He snatched it back to Aziraphale’s startlement, checked himself, and then reached again.

Aziraphale became a bow string—immobile, resonating to the friction of Crowley’s fingers tracing the lines on his chest. Circling to move with intent over ribs and up to the shoulder. The kintsugi forked across his back, one line meandering down to the hip while the other made a complete circuit. Crowley paced around him. And when he should have bumped into the loveseat, the seat was suddenly gone, across the room. Aziraphale barely noticed.

There was nothing but the touch, tracing his shame with tender kindness.

He shook as Crowley’s finger passed beneath his arm. Trembled as they moved over his chest, approaching the odd triangle that marred his breastbone. The demon ended his stalk where he had begun, and after a moment of taking everything in seemed to notice the shaking.

“Are you cold?”

His hands came to rest on Aziraphale’s waist as though it was their natural home.

Aziraphale swallowed. “No,” he managed to say, though it sounded very much like a lie.

“Are you sure? I could get you a—“

“I’m not cold,” he insisted.

The heat from the palms against his skin intensified anyway. And it was—

Well, it was sweet, really. As had been a hundred things past over the years.

Aziraphale clenched his hands into fists briefly, summoning courage, and gazed at the dark red glasses. He swallowed. Then reached out and very carefully slid them from Crowley’s face. He folded the temples slowly, clicking one, then the other. And from the flat of his hand miracled them to the side table beneath the orchid.

Crowley squinted at the light, then stared at him with a look of question.

Aziraphale smiled a little. “I so rarely get to see you properly,” he said.

Astonishment wrote plain across Crowley’s face, and he looked away in uncommon embarrassment. It defeated the point entirely.

Aziraphale’s fingers alighted on cheek and chin to urge Crowley to look at him. And then it was his turn to gasp. The skin beneath his fingertips shifted to black scales that faded to orange at the edges. He let go, and the scales vanished. Fascinated, and on what counted for Aziraphale as mad impulse, he touched his index finger to Crowley’s cheekbone and drew a little sigil, smiling as the scales bloomed and faded in the wake of the pressure.

He let out a pleased little laugh, and only then seemed to notice that he’d been drawing on someone’s face—which might be rude—and schooled himself to dignity. Or what passed for it when half-naked.

In reply, the corners of Crowley’s mouth pinched into a grin, and his eyes got devilish wide.

“You know, there’s a spot that never changes.”

“What?”

Suddenly Crowley spun away from him, flinging his jacket to the floor like it burned and then undoing shirt buttons.

“Crowley, what are— Stop. No. Put that—”

But he was already stripped to the waist, grinning and twisting to point.

“See?”

He did see. A patch of iridescent black scales the size of two palms adorned the small of Crowley’s back, its edges flaring to orange before fading into human skin.

“No matter what I do,” Crowley admitted, though he looked rather pleased. “Always there.”

It’s important to note that angels are not, by their nature, impulsive.

Aziraphale had been practicing. What with averting the apocalypse and befriending the Antichrist. He’d once popped over to America for a cronut.

He _indulged_.

He was, in point of fact, the most impulsive angel there had ever been.

Impulse closed the space between them. Impulse had him press a hand to the scales, surprisingly cool. Indulgence made him draw a caress up the demon’s spine, skin blossoming into scales and back.

Crowley arched into it, stretching tall. And when Aziraphale’s hand came to rest on the back of his neck, he let out a breath in a sigh at the squeeze. He turned without dislodging the grip—without trying to—slitted eyes dark, and in a blink his mouth pressed over the gold veins, marking the ragged triangle on Aziraphale’s chest with lips and heat. He started to trace the line over a pectoral muscle, and Aziraphale made a sound at the feather flick of a forked tongue and tightened his grip.

Crowley stopped and lifted his head slightly without looking up. His rapid breathing cooled the wet marks he’d left. His hands clung to Aziraphale’s arm and waist, and he swallowed audibly.

“Too fast for you?” A whisper.

All the angel could see was a red shock of hair tickling at his nose. He hesitated. None of this should even be here anymore. But it was. They were. Then he eased his fingers from Crowley’s neck and ran them up into the wild, silky locks just for the feel of it across his skin.

“No,” he said, with an impish smile his partner could not see. “Just right.”

  



End file.
